Jerry Clutts knows one guy who got tired of retirement in about three days and went back to work. Another retired acquaintance bought a small publishing company to keep himself busy, and others are filling in at the Des Moines Independent Community School District, where Clutts worked for 38 years.

As for Clutts, the first five months of retirement have filled up just fine without the hassles of gainful employment, although he has done some consulting work for the school system, a task he can perform from home.

Bill Cain also has seen retirees get bored and go to work picking up laundry or helping at an electrical and plumbing business.

But in eight years of retirement, Cain has avoided employment completely. “Most of my peers have done something,” he said. “They had to keep busy, and I thought maybe I was like that too; but finally I woke up one day and said, ‘I’m going to quit apologizing for being lazy,’” and that was the end of that.

Clutts and Cain both retired before the traditional age of 65 – Clutts is 60 and Cain left St. Paul Travelers Cos. Inc. at 59 1/2 after a 35-year career there. Both seem happy with their decisions. And both attribute part of their good circumstances to making careful financial plans before leaving the rat race.

Clutts was as systematic about retirement preparation as a teacher making lesson plans. “For two years, I talked to people about it,” he said. “I interviewed five people who had retired” to find out what they had experienced.

He also intensified his talks with Steve Houg, a vice president at Holmes Murphy & Associates Inc. “I set the goal a long time ago of retiring around 60,” Clutts said. “I didn’t dislike the work at all, but I had a lot of things I wanted to do while I was still healthy and able.” That mindset led him to financial adviser Jim Wolfe in 1995. When Wolfe passed away, Clutts and his wife, Janice, began working with Houg.

Cain was thinking about retiring at 62, but changes in the company made him push up the timetable. A couple of years before he would eventually retire, he and his wife, Lois, went to Steve Hall, also a Holmes Murphy vice president.

“Our question was, will we have enough to live comfortably?” Cain said. “That’s all we wanted. We wanted to make sure we could do what we want, and grow our assets a little.”

Clutts benefited from a generous severance package from the Des Moines schools, and Cain had taken advantage of St. Paul Travelers’ 401(k) and employee stock ownership plans. Those programs did a lot to ease the way into retirement.

However, the steady disappearance of corporate pension plans is putting more of the burden for retirement planning onto workers. According to a study by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a human resources consulting firm, 71 companies on the Fortune 1,000 list froze or terminated their traditional pension plans in 2004.

Last week, Verizon Communications Inc. announced that 50,000 company managers will stop earning pension benefits and service credits. Hewlett-Packard Co. said earlier this year that it is ending guaranteed pensions for new hires; Sears Holdings Corp. will freeze pension benefits next year; and Motorola Inc. stopped offering pensions to new employees this year.

“The companies are shifting risk to the employee, so we’ve got to create investment income,” Hall said. “People tend to focus on their 401(k), then when they retire, they say, ‘I’m done worrying about this; you just make sure I get a check every month for X amount of dollars.’”

That’s easier to accomplish if a few years of planning have been done. “It has to do with the passion they have for their goal,” said Hall, who has worked in financial planning for 23 years. Reaching that goal “sometimes means they have to radically change the way they’re living.”

For example, he had clients who needed to save an extra $400 per month – and were making a $400 monthly payment on a boat. When Hall suggested the obvious solution, “their countenances just fell,” he said. “But if you’re not willing to make changes, then don’t tell me retirement is your No. 1 priority.”

Even clients who are quite well off financially can find themselves scrambling to set up an effective retirement plan. “It happens quite frequently that successful business people haven’t paid enough attention to their personal finances,” Hall said.

“If you’re accustomed to living on $500,000, it takes a massive amount to keep that lifestyle going.”

No matter what the income level, every retirement is a step into the unknown. “Retirement doesn’t always match expectations,” Hall said. “If you get sick, that changes everything. It drains your resources, and you can’t go back to work.”

Hall and Houg said they try to allow for some bad news by building sufficient margin into the plan. “We started with an estimated annual return on our investments of 7 percent or 8 percent,” Cain said. He happened to retire when the stock market was shooting upward, and he said, “the first four years helped to ease our worries tremendously.”

Cain had the option of taking his retirement benefits as a lump sum or in monthly payments, and most of his colleagues chose the steady, reliable monthly check. However, he and Hall decided on the lump sum.

“The majority of the time, you’re better off taking the lump sum,” Hall said. “For a company to guarantee a certain return, they have to make very conservative assumptions. The question is, ‘Can I do better than that?’ and usually the answer is yes.”

The Cains’ money is invested in a mix of stocks and bonds, and they receive a monthly check that Holmes Murphy draws from the bond portion of their portfolio. “That’s the portion that’s designed to generate income,” Hall said. “We periodically transfer money from stocks to bonds to keep the portfolio balanced.”

The Cains meet with Hall about once every quarter to discuss their situation. When it came time to buy a car, they took the money from their bond investments. “Borrowing can be better,” Hall said, “but emotionally, Bill was better off not borrowing.”

Clutts will see his finances change significantly when his Social Security benefits begin to flow at age 62. For now, “the goal has been to leave my 403(b) retirement plan alone as much as possible,” he said. “That’s what’s growing.”

The Cains have seen their assets grow each year, and the Clutts family anticipates the same experience. Their advisers say that’s almost essential for a comfortable retirement, as a means of staying ahead of inflation.

“The key factor is being debt-free,” Cain said. “I’m amazed at how little you can live on if you’re debt-free.”

Clutts has made a point of sharing his financial information with his adult sons, and both are now clients of Houg.

He also asked for retirement advice from his father, who retired from General Motors Corp. at the age of 57 and is now 89. “He said, ‘I have not regretted it for a minute. You’ll love it.’”